Activists work for a greater good, which may just inconvenience you
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Version 0 of 1. Thanks to timing and a lot of activism by our forefathers, the vast majority of Americans today have never known real suffering. They constitute what Martin Luther King, Jr called, “the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action.’” To this cohort, otherwise known as mainstream America, on-the-ground activism is unhelpful and even un-American – largely because it’s inconvenient. Sure, they’ll give you a “like” on Facebook, but your march better not block traffic on their way to work. We’ve lost perspective in this country. Activism is not supposed to be convenient. Civil disobedience implies that some laws will be peacefully broken. At the Boston Tea Party, the Sons of Liberty destroyed an entire shipment of tea sent by the East India Company. You think people weren’t inconvenienced? The latest American activist moment is set to happen Saturday at the “Justice or Else” gathering in Washington DC to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Million Man March. Last month, users on the city’s Reddit page had already dismissed the event as nothing more than a potential traffic nuisance. We like to believe that we’re far more media savvy than our forefathers, and we’re proud of it – so we’ll discount an entire civil rights movement if we don’t agree with its marketing tactics. Take the Black Lives Matter movement, a group that is fighting for our civil rights in the area of criminal justice. The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights has stated that, in America’s criminal justice system, racial inequality is growing, not receding, even though we’ve made great progress toward ensuring equal treatment under the law for all citizens in the areas of voting, education, employment, equal housing and public accommodations. The fallout from the lack of progress on criminal justice threatens to undo 50 years of civil rights work. Still, when a group of so-called progressives gathered in Seattle (supposedly one of America’s most liberal cities) at a rally for presidential candidate Bernie Sanders in August, no one in the audience seemed to care much about that well-established civil rights issue when a couple of activists from the Seattle Black Lives Matter group took over the stage. I, too, was tempted to dismiss the Seattle BLM protestors – though not the movement. Then I decided to do a simple internet search to find out what they were on about. Within seconds, I found the answer: a press release posted on the Seattle Black Lives Matter Facebook page the same day as the protest stated that the group got on stage to highlight the fact that the Seattle Police Department has been under federal consent decree for the last three years due to a pattern of excessive force and discriminatory police practices that the US Department of Justice found to be in violation of the Constitution. Related: Why Bernie Sanders' run-in with Black Lives Matter activists made me squirm | Heather Barmore Since 2011, Seattle Mayor Ed Murray has refused to push any reform measures for police accountability even after his self-appointed Community Police Commission made numerous suggestions. (Seattle’s alt-weekly The Stranger said in June of this year that, “If reforming the police department were a big class project, then Murray would be so late turning in his homework he’d be failing.”) In the unedited video of the Seattle Black Lives Matter incident—unlike in the much shorter clips that went viral at the time—BLM activists list these issues from their press release and are roundly booed by the crowd of so-called Seattle progressives. Online it was no better. Sanders supporters disavowed Black Lives Matter, claiming they would be against killing black people in the street, but these young women behaved so rudely that BLM could just forget counting on their support now. Eight weeks later when a group of activists marching against police violence in Austin – another so-called bastion of white liberalism – decided to walk onto the interstate to get some attention, an act I admittedly wouldn’t advise for the sake of your health, Austinites on Reddit were up in arms over the traffic disruption. The top comment: Fuck these people and any other protesters that think it’s okay to block major avenues of traffic. I’m all for their right to protest, but them blocking highways is just unacceptable. That being delayed in traffic is more outrageous to the average American than the habitual violation of our civil rights is disheartening – but apparently, it’s nothing new. When Martin Luther King, Jr led a series of boycotts and sit-ins to fight discrimination in 1963 in Birmingham, Alabama, a whole crew of clergymen got together to publish a letter in the paper urging their congregations not to support him. While they agreed with the idea of equality in principle, they didn’t like Dr. King’s tendency to break the law during his organized actions. Dr. King’s response to these men of the cloth is the now famous Letter from a Birmingham Jail in which he states that people have “a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws,” in order to “create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.” This country was built on rebellion, incivility and revolution, and we used to call the people who practiced those traits heroes and patriots. If similar behavior ruffles your feathers today, take a closer look at yourself. You might just be on the wrong side of history. |